Something In The Air

Chapter 5 - Casino Night

The next morning, Maddox awoke with a start and immediately turned on his side, a fit of vigorous coughs spasming through his body. With his eyes watering and ribs smarting from the brutal internal force, he retched several times into the bin that he kept by the side of his bed, then sat up. He'd been awake for less than thirty seconds, but he was already fully alert. He looked over at the window and even though it was barely even sunrise he knew he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep again.

He had a lot of time to kill before the charity casino event later that evening, but fortunately, even at the best of times, looking after his cystic fibrosis was almost a full-time vocation. Now with this new infection making an unwelcome visit, he would have to make sure that he followed his treatment plan more rigorously than ever. To make things interesting he also had a number of other jobs that he needed to do, a list of which had accumulated in his notebook over the past couple of days.

Firstly he went downstairs into his office to switch on his laptop – which, unlike him, always took at least five minutes to awaken – then stood under a hot shower for ten minutes, breathing in the hot steam and feeling it course through his airways. Apparently, the steam was beneficial in dilating his airways and liquefying some of the thick sticky secretions that were clogged up in there, but mainly he simply enjoyed the sensation.

While breakfast was cooking, he sat down at the kitchen and tackled his first few inhalers of the day, dispelling the vaporised medication into a plastic tube called a spacer from which he steadily breathed the drug in. If he was going for a run he would usually take extra doses of salbutamol – an asthma drug which helped improve his lung function in the short term – but the last thing he needed was to push himself too far and cause more damage, so today he was giving himself the morning off. After swallowing a small bucket-load of additional pills, including some new antibiotics and vitamin supplements, he piled his breakfast onto a plate and carried it into the office.

"Dammit," Maddox muttered as he knocked over a random pile of papers whilst trying to find space on the desk for his plate. He slumped down into his office chair and took a large bite of scrambled egg on toast as he looked over at his notebook and honed in on the first item on the agenda.

A quick Google search of 'art exhibitions London' brought up over eight million results, so Maddox quickly deleted his original entry and typed in 'Sophie Morfakis art' instead. The first link that came up was for a page on the Tate Britain website titled 'New Nature-Themed Exhibit Opens To Public' and was dated back to last year. Maddox clicked on it and found Sophie's name among a whole host of other artists who'd contributed artwork towards the new exhibit. There were images of a few of them on display, illuminated on the wall by bright hidden spotlights, and he couldn't keep help thinking that any of Sophie's pieces were far superior in quality.

The next result came from the London Evening Standard and was an article reporting on a local art competition which had been run by a nearby college about six months ago. There had been no restrictions placed on what could be produced and apparently over a hundred people had submitted handiwork to be critiqued. Maddox wasn't sure if he was surprised or not to find that Sophie had been one of the prize-winners, coming in first place overall and receiving rave reviews from the judges: "flawless", "exquisite" and "evocative" were just a few of the soundbites that the journalist had chosen to include in her report. There was a large photograph about halfway down the page, Sophie pictured on stage with her painting as she accepted a certificate and a sealed envelope from a woman of about the same age with frizzy brown hair. They were both smiling and Maddox affirmed how even her grin was identical to her sister's. The painting itself was once again worthy of all the accolades the journalist had given it - a breath-taking landscape of an old barge drifting along a dense tree-lined stretch of river.